Your TV dinners: share your Mad Men-inspired meals

From cheese fondue to boeuf bourguignon, Mad Men is full of 60s-style fine dining. In this month's Your TV dinners, we're challenging you to create a Mad Men-themed dish – and to show us what you've made

Last month we launched Your TV dinners, a series in which we asked you to share pictures of your meal of choice while watching a specific show. We began with The Sopranos, a series with a “pile it up and I’ll knock it down” ethos towards food, featuring extended scenes of New Jersey’s finest gleefully scarfing down everything from sandwiches to sfogliatelle. Duly you responded with your own mouth-watering images of ratatouille, pasta padahn, and an artery-clogger going by the name of the Bobby Bacala Bagel.

Next up for your delectation is Mad Men, a show which, though a little more circumspect in its culinary tastes – it’s hard to imagine Don Draper shovelling down lobster linguine in the manner of Tony Soprano – still takes its scran, and the accompanying beverage to wash it down with, very seriously indeed.

As with every other period detail on the show, Mad Men’s creators are gimlet-eyed in their attention to food and drink, offering up an exhaustive history of Madison Avenue fine dining in the 60s. From the pu pu platter seen in the very first episode right up to the cheese fondue served by Don’s wife Megan in the 1968-set premiere of the current season, every prevailing trend of the period finds its way into the series. And, thanks to the adventurous spirit of the New York dining scene at the time, there are some exotic possibilities for anyone looking to emulate Mad Ave’s culinary output. Why not have a bash at making the mock-Polynesian hors d’oeuvre Rumaki for a Mad Men-themed dinner party, or try your hand at preparing the boeuf bourguignon made for Don by Megan (a whizz in the kitchen, it seems) in season five... though you might want to draw a line at Betty’s ghastly-looking squat house goulash in the first episode of the show’s current season.

Or you could go down a different path altogether and create an experimental dish out of the various food and drink products represented by Sterling Cooper and Sterling Cooper Draper Price over the years, though that would mean an interesting ingredients list featuring Utz potato chips, Sugarberry hams, Life cereal, Heinz baked beans, Van Camp seafood and Mountain Dew – with a sprinkling of Secor Laxatives on top, perhaps.

Then of course there’s the booze, sloshed down by the show’s characters in prodigious quantities, and the subject of numerous books, blogs, and even an official iPhone app. From mai tais, mojitos and martinis, to the comparatively unfussy rye whiskey which the partners glug down by the caseful in the SC/SCDP offices, you’ve plenty of options. And that’s without even mentioning that American classic, the Old Fashioned, which happens to be Don Draper’s tipple of choice. Whatever you do imbibe, make sure that you’re doing it for the right reasons, perhaps best explained by that veteran lush Roger Sterling: “My generation, we drink because it’s good, because it feels better than unbuttoning your collar, because we deserve it.”

Finally, those looking for an altogether more daredevil dining experience could recreate the show’s most memorable culinary scene – a dinner date between Don and Roger in which the former gained revenge for the latter’s attempts to hit on wife Betty by plying him with copious quantities of oysters and martinis before marching him up 23 flights of stairs. That one probably should come with a health warning, though: no sooner had Roger finished his climb than he found himself expelling his lunch all over the shoes of a group of prospective clients.

None of the above quite match your culinary ambitions? Feel free to attempt something of your own creation. As long as it’s edible and Mad Men-centric, we want to see it. Just click on the blue ‘contribute’ button to share your photos using GuardianWitness. We’ll publish our favourites on the Guardian website next month.

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